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Playing open war (rather decent game mode using a deck of cards) isn't the same as playing open play (do whatever the hell you like with three rather bad sample missions) though.

After multiple people have talked about how great playing the 9th edition open war deck is, I've actually tried it myself and found it to be a vastly superior game mode to GT2021 for dadhammer games. This really is what should be in the BRB instead of "Matched Play".

 Jidmah wrote:
This really is what should be in the BRB instead of "Matched Play".

But then they wouldn't be able to sell you cards.

9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this. But what specifically makes it 'tournament-hammer'? The missions. They're complete garbage. They foster a very specific style of play and reward very specific types of armies. Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward.

I think the 9th edition core rules are pretty solid. Some tweaks would be welcome to incorporate the keyword system more rather than have arbitrary limits and caps (e.g. Look Out, Sir and Obscuring terrain being based on wounds quantity). Any rule that needs a limit or a cap is simply bad design (mission objective VP limits are another great example; hence; Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward).

To course correct GW needs to stop pandering to the tournament players and get back to the fundamentals that made W40K fun and enjoyable. They can start by taking a step back towards codex simplicity with a heavy handed reduction in stratagems, detachment abilities, relics, warlord traits, etc. Next, is the elimination of book-keeping; we should be putting our time and efforts into playing and not constantly coming to a full stop to log and track win conditions. Again, Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward.

Narrative Play should have remained exactly what it was in 8th edition; the inclusion of City Fight, Planetstrike, Stronghold Assault, campaign books, etc. The whole Crusade thing is and continues to be a non-starter. It will never gain traction no matter how hard GW may try. I applaud GW for trying something new but, this one didn't pan out.

To expound on what WintersSEO says in his video about "accessibility" to 9th edition... He's alluding to what attracts people to W40K and has them make the plunge into it and that is; W40K is first and foremost a 'game of fun' not a 'mental competition'. A 'game of fun' is inviting to all. A 'mental competition' is a lot less attractive and unappealing, hence less accessible. GW has lost sight of W40K being a 'game of fun' as they pander more and more to tournament-hammer.

On a side note, before everyone dog piles onto me. I may sound like a broken record with the whole Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward comment... I'm sure Mike is a nice person, maybe even a loving husband and father, but this does not mean he's good at his job. In fact I think he sucks at his job writing the GT pack and missions for GW and it's my opinion that he has had an extremely detrimental impact on W40K similar to, if not worse than, Matt Ward did, back in late 5th and all of 6th edition. You can be a good person with the best of intentions, but still suck at your job.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
This really is what should be in the BRB instead of "Matched Play".

But then they wouldn't be able to sell you cards.

To be honest, GT secondaries would have made lot more sense as cards.

Slipspace wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
Primarily, the main problem I have at this point is compared to other games I play, 40k feels incredibly un-interactive and incredibly just drop-dead instant deadly, and I think that impression is more based on 'a large fraction of your units basically only get to TRY to do one single thing before they die' than any actual 'how long does your army last in terms of turn-count.'

This is the biggest problem for me too. 9th edition just makes it so easy to remove entire units in one go. Yes, terrain can help to mitigate alpha strikes but the problem remains that units are rarely able to withstand being attacked and those that can often do so only by stacking ridiculous defensive statlines and buffs to the point that regular units can't scratch them. There's not enough incremental advantage in 40k because the only way to interact with your opponent is to kill their stuff. Other wargames have concepts like suppression or some sort of working morale system, or positioning where you can sacrifice damage output on one turn for a superior position in the next. 40k has "you can't see these guys so they're safe" and "these guys are visible so they're dead if my opponent wants them to be".

I always think back to an interview Gav Thorpe gave about the 3rd edition Wraithlord when he said the designers were worried it might be too powerful because it could kill up to 3 Space Marines in a single close combat phase! The average was a mighty 2 Space Marines. Nowadays it's not uncommon for single units to be able to kill 2 whole units each per round.

I really feel like people are taking the cause out of 'cause and effect' here.

If a 200 point unit dies, but it took 400 to 500 points to do it - what's the problem? Everyone acts like it's just a given while ignoring what percentage the opponent wound up putting into killing that unit.

Imagine 20 Vanguard Vets using Enriched Rounds ( they shouldn't ) to kill 5 marines in cover - they'd kill two marines. The notorious unit that kills anything and costs 200 points managed to kill 40 with an additional 2CP. Maybe 20 Ranger Vets could with Volley? Nope - just 3 instead and another 2 CP.

Ok maybe 3 Las Chickens shooting a Contemptor. That seems like a plausible scenario. The average damage is 8.9. It must be dead, right? Hold on. The average wounds is 1.77, which means one gets through and second MIGHT get through. What's the real probability? 54%. 225 points has a 54% chance to kill 150. There's also a 12% chance it goes completely unscathed. But people only focus on that coin flip where the outcome was bad for them and never remember the times it survived.

There's not enough incremental advantage in 40k because the only way to interact with your opponent is to kill their stuff. Other wargames have concepts like suppression or some sort of working morale system, or positioning where you can sacrifice damage output on one turn for a superior position in the next. 40k has "you can't see these guys so they're safe" and "these guys are visible so they're dead if my opponent wants them to be".

But it does have that. People play like killing is the only thing they do. Holding units back for later matters. Making good decisions on when to move and where to move matters. Having units with superior speed to get an angle on units behind obscuring matters.

Just pushing models forward and hoping for the best loses you the game. If 40K had *no* depth this would be false, because then you would simply do more damage and win.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 oni wrote:
9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this. But what specifically makes it 'tournament-hammer'? The missions. They're complete garbage. They foster a very specific style of play and reward very specific types of armies. Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward.

Have you spent any time using the beta Maelstrom rules?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 oni wrote:
9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this. But what specifically makes it 'tournament-hammer'? The missions. They're complete garbage. They foster a very specific style of play and reward very specific types of armies. Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward.

Have you spent any time using the beta Maelstrom rules?

I like the 8th edition Chapter Approved missions. They're amazing and still work very well.

I have not yet tried the new Maelstrom rules from White Dwarf.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
This really is what should be in the BRB instead of "Matched Play".

But then they wouldn't be able to sell you cards.

If they sold you Open War cards they wouldn't be able to sell you Matched Play cards, the evil capitalists are selling you cards instead of selling you cards.

 oni wrote:
9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this.

9th edition is casual-hammer, no effort was put into any other part of the game.

The missions... complete garbage. They foster a very specific style of play and reward very specific types of armies.

The only type of army that is awful at the 9th missions is a static gunline, something a lot of people are happy about, the rest is just a matter of a lack of balanced pts costs making certain units and strategies inefficient.

Mike Brandt = The new Matt Ward.

Mike Brandt does not write rules, he might comment or test them, but he was in fact unhappy with the newest mission and points update and aware of the lack of balance, something he probably would have worked to fix if he wasn't a community organizer and was an author as you think he is.

... arbitrary limits and caps (e.g. Look Out, Sir and Obscuring terrain being based on wounds quantity).

The alternative is having to ask whether each individual model is an independent character and snowflake HQs that get the independent character treatment despite comparable characters from other characters not getting it because the rules were written at different times, no thanks.

Any rule that needs a limit or a cap is simply bad design

So unique characters need rules that somehow disincentivise but still allow bringing multiple of them? You are being silly. I would agree on the Tau Empire Commander max 1/detachment, but saying ANY rule that puts a cap or limit on something is bad design is wrong. Stratagems dealing 12 mortal wounds for 2CP is absurd, putting a limit can make the Stratagem useful more often without ever being too strong.

...They can start by taking a step back towards codex simplicity... Again, Mike Brandt...

Okay, where are you getting the idea that Mike Brandt is fuelling bloat? Is this a joke?

aphyon wrote:

A legit opinion, but compared to 4th or 5th? Back then there were only three missions to play and one (Kill Points) was extremely harsh on some armies,

That is not the mission options i remember
kill points or unit kill value prior to that were a thing but there was also-
.1- objective in each players deployment zone to defend
.2-d3+2 objectives to take and hold
.3-center objective(king of the hill)
.4-move-able center objective(up to 6" per player turn)
.5-table quarters (the quarter opposite was worth 2 VP and each of the others to the sides were worth 1(your own was worth zero to you)
.6-over-run/breakout-playing from end to end VP for getting units into or keeping them out of the defenders back 24" zone (defender starts at the halfway point on the table).

So that's 7 mission options of which 6 of them force players to move off of just gun-line style play especially when adequate terrain is on the table that blocks LOS.

Seize Ground was #2 on your list
Capture and Control was #1 and it was basically just a mission with two objectives
Annihilation was kill points

I don't recall a supplement with those other missions, but literally no one is stopping you from playing missions like that -- aside from the people you play with. And if they don't? It's because something like king of the hill makes for pretty gakky games in reality.

None of them are very dynamic. Oh you can move the center objective 6"? I wonder which way it will go. The secondaries we have now accomplish way more nuance than any mission in 40k's history.

I can only recommend trying out the actual Crusade missions, even in your normal games.

They add some variety as well.

kirotheavenger wrote:I truly hate secondaries. I just want to play a game and it's an unholy amount of faff. They present you with three options; learn the secondaries and which ones are best in a given matchup, spend 15 minutes before a game reading and choosing them, or don't think about it and just pick whatever.
The first is a lot of information to ingrain, totally impractical for a casual player. The second is a huge waste of time for everyone involved. The third is doomed to failure as secondaries are fully half the game, throwing away good choices can really hurt you.

I much prefer Open War. Simple, you draw the cards and you play the mission. But still varied and interesting.

Yup, secondaries blow.

Open War Deck is fun period. In 8th, out of the 300ish open war games I played, we had the "same" cards...once. it wasn't even the same game due to different terrain, units and it was against a different player.

a_typical_hero wrote:
I can only recommend trying out the actual Crusade missions, even in your normal games.

They add some variety as well.

Do you and PenitantJake just spend your days trying to find ways to suggest playing Crusade in every thread?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
Primarily, the main problem I have at this point is compared to other games I play, 40k feels incredibly un-interactive and incredibly just drop-dead instant deadly, and I think that impression is more based on 'a large fraction of your units basically only get to TRY to do one single thing before they die' than any actual 'how long does your army last in terms of turn-count.'

This is the biggest problem for me too. 9th edition just makes it so easy to remove entire units in one go. Yes, terrain can help to mitigate alpha strikes but the problem remains that units are rarely able to withstand being attacked and those that can often do so only by stacking ridiculous defensive statlines and buffs to the point that regular units can't scratch them. There's not enough incremental advantage in 40k because the only way to interact with your opponent is to kill their stuff. Other wargames have concepts like suppression or some sort of working morale system, or positioning where you can sacrifice damage output on one turn for a superior position in the next. 40k has "you can't see these guys so they're safe" and "these guys are visible so they're dead if my opponent wants them to be".

I always think back to an interview Gav Thorpe gave about the 3rd edition Wraithlord when he said the designers were worried it might be too powerful because it could kill up to 3 Space Marines in a single close combat phase! The average was a mighty 2 Space Marines. Nowadays it's not uncommon for single units to be able to kill 2 whole units each per round.

I really feel like people are taking the cause out of 'cause and effect' here.

If a 200 point unit dies, but it took 400 to 500 points to do it - what's the problem? Everyone acts like it's just a given while ignoring what percentage the opponent wound up putting into killing that unit.

Imagine 20 Vanguard Vets using Enriched Rounds ( they shouldn't ) to kill 5 marines in cover - they'd kill two marines. The notorious unit that kills anything and costs 200 points managed to kill 40 with an additional 2CP. Maybe 20 Ranger Vets could with Volley? Nope - just 3 instead and another 2 CP.

Ok maybe 3 Las Chickens shooting a Contemptor. That seems like a plausible scenario. The average damage is 8.9. It must be dead, right? Hold on. The average wounds is 1.77, which means one gets through and second MIGHT get through. What's the real probability? 54%. 225 points has a 54% chance to kill 150. There's also a 12% chance it goes completely unscathed. But people only focus on that coin flip where the outcome was bad for them and never remember the times it survived.

That's probably because I, the "Target" player, have only one option during my opponent's turn, i.e., to be 'The Target' and maybe pop 1-2 defensive strats or interrupts over the course of my opponent's entire turn.

Yeah, it's tough to remember That Time When The Las-Chicken Shot It's Super-Lascannons At My Guy And I Made My 6+ Armor Save, because the next las-chicken just shoots, I don't make my save vs that one, and I have accomplished "mildly inconveniencing my opponent' through no fault of my own but instead just because I rolled a 6 on a die.

For a truly memorable 'oh my god, it survived' event to occur, your thing needs to survive EVERYTHING your opponent has to throw at it, and in a game with super-duper-hyper-accommodating "TrUe" line of sight and a board size that makes range an essentially meaningless stat for around 2/3s of the units in the game, generally that just doesn't happen.

let's take my most recent game as an example - admech and drukhari, two top codexes using somewhat, but not entirely optimized lists. The moments of unexpected survival were as follows:

1 - turn 1, I shoot two Void Lances from my bomber at my opponent's Scorpius Disintegrator, and it survives on 2 hit points left.

....Then, I shoot a single disintegrator from a raider at it. It dies.

2 - Turn 2 - my opponent counter-charges Sicarian Ruststalkers into a unit of 15 Hellions, but I've given them a 4++ and I also drop a -1 to hit on them, so only 10 die, and the remaining 5 swing back and kill the whole ruststalker squad except for 1. The Ruststalker alpha flees, 3/5 of the remaining hellions flee, and the 2 remaining hellions are unexpectedly left on the board, don't spend it all in one place I guess!

3 - 9 antitank weapons including 2 heat lances and 4 dark lances completely fail to cause any damage to an admech flyer. This one actually did impact the outcome of the game.

4 - lelith survives the close combat attacks of a techpriest dominus, staying on one hit point. Then, on my opponent's turn, the dominus falls back and 3 skitarii vanguard easily dispatch lelith.

I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Competitive tournament setups with gigantic amounts of LOS blocking terrain might be able to turn the game into kind of a 'rocket tag cat-and-mouse' setup but if you take 2 people who have generally read thrugh the rules and set up to play a game, it is absolutely normal for each player to be losing 500-750pt chunks of their 2000pt army turn 1, turn 2 and turn 3 and someone being basically on the verge of being tabled on the bottom of turn 3 is exceedingly common.

From a gameplay perspective, I just cannot see how that isn't viewed as a massive, glaring problem, and how this could be the intended state of the game from the designers. "I got to make 0-2 decisions with any given one of my units" does not, to me, seem like something one should aim for if youre trying to design a wargame.

 oni wrote:

The whole Crusade thing is and continues to be a non-starter. It will never gain traction no matter how hard GW may try. I applaud GW for trying something new but, this one didn't pan out.

{Shrugs} Crusade sure seems popular in my gaming circle & the two local shops I frequent:

•Shop A has run two Crusades.
The first one had 16 players.
The current one has 12. This dip though isn't about the pros/cons of Crusade, just real life getting in the way for 3 players (back to work/spouse back to work. we're running it here in july- Sept vs in the winter...) the 4th player? He just didn't like 9e as a whole. He'd play Crusade again though - if we used 4e/5e as a base rule set.

Shop B? Has a considerably larger player base.
The last Crusade they ran had almost 30 players!
The next one they run will likely have that or more (there's been additional new players get into the game there between then & now and I know several of them are looking forward to going on Crusade)
Don't get me wrong, there's still

So maybe Crusade lacks traction where ever your at. But around here? Pretty popular.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Do you and PenitantJake just spend your days trying to find ways to suggest playing Crusade in every thread?

I think bringing up another set of missions people can play, when we are talking about it at the moment, is just a normal thing to do, isn't it? Mind you I suggested the Crusade missions, not playing Crusade mode.
I let your unnecessary try to attack PenitentJake and me in lieu of a meaningful contribution speak for itself.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 Blackie wrote:


I second this, Crusade is not easy to handle for someone that is trying to learn the game. I'd suggest to play matched 1000 points if the goal is to learn the game mechanics. Smaller formats only if players don't have enough models, as at 1000 points it feels like a proper 40k experience while 500 points is closer to Kill Team.

Disagree. Its easier to learn a game in small increments. Unless you're playing with just unit and weapon statlines and no unit or faction special rules 1000pts will have too many things to keep track of. 500pts gives you enough room to learn the fundamentals without overwhelming people. If you're worried about the "proper 40k experience" whatever that is then why not just go straight to 2000pts?

That's an argument for playing small games, not for playing Crusade (=small games with a pile of extra rules on top of the base game).

ccs wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

But past editions weren't better. The rules were hundreds of pages long, filled to the brim with opaque nonsense and poor design choices the same way every rule GW has ever written has been. Once you learned the game it was relatively simple to keep up to date with it but it would be a week of sitting around reading the rulebook before someone could even reasonably be able to play through a basic movement phase->shooting phase. Remember, back in those days it took 30+ pages just to tell you how to move a model from point A to point B. With 9th you could feasibly play a basic marine vs marine 500pt game the first day you pick up the rulebook and be pretty confident in the basics by the end of it.

Hmm. Either your describing 7th ed (the only edition I didn't play & don't own any books for) OR your prone to hyperbole, misremembering RT - 6e, & played these games with exceptionally stupid people.
Because your not describing any edition of 40k I've ever played....

ERJAK wrote:

Older editions started off with overbloated rules and added more stuff relatively sparingly until they got boring or broke completely (looking at you 5th).

Again, must've been a 7th ed thing. Because GWs never been shy about adding new/more stuff. The only difference was that you didn't receive it all within a 3 yr window.

ERJAK wrote:

3. Bring the damage down a bit. Shooting and melee. That way you don't end up with things like the vehicle teeter totter we're seeing right now (i.e. Melta makes Vehicles bad so no one brings vehicles. No one bringing vehicles means people stop bringing melta. No one bringing melta means vehicles get good, vehicles being good means more people bring melta. Etc.) Or the being reliant on terrain to extend engagements.

Not sure how you expect GW to solve that one. The dance of bringing/not bringing of AT weapons vs bringing/not bringing vehicles to a game has been going on longer than 40ks existed.
It's just answering the fundamental questions of "What's the other guy likely to bring? How can I take advantage of that?"

1. I am prone to illustrative hyperbole, my greater points stands. The older rulebooks were terrible. When you were learning you might have THOUGHT you were playing the game right after the first couple readthroughs of the book but you weren't. At all. I guarantee your first couple games were the wargaming equivalent of clacking dolls together and making pew-pew noises, ESPECIALLY if you thought 6e was approachable. Having someone who was already familiar with the game helps with learning the absolute basics, but it was literally 30 pages of rules to be able to pick up any model you owned and walk it from open terrain into cover.

That's all completely ignoring the fact that a lot of the rules just straight up didn't work in previous editions and you need either house rules or community faqs to get around nonsensical rules interations.

2. Do you just not know what sparingly means? 1 supplement book and 1 codex every couple of months is VERY 'sparingly', I don't care what the actual total of books is at the end.

3. You completely lost the forests for the trees there. It's not really even worth illustrating how the example that vehicles are almost completely worthless until the average oppenent is bringing literally NO anti-tank at all, rather than just a natural ebb and flow of favoring vs not favoring armor to a couple of degrees, is a problem that has it's roots in the lethality issue of the game.

 oni wrote:
9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this.

Yes, there is disputing this, because I dispute it. Again, whether or not YOU play Open or Crusade, both of these things do exist, and both are 9th ed. phenomenon.

I will not dispute that Matched play was designed for the tournament scene, with input from TO's. This is very clearly true.

That is not the same as "9th is the tournament edition," whether YOU think it is or not.

 oni wrote:

Narrative Play should have remained exactly what it was in 8th edition; the inclusion of City Fight, Planetstrike, Stronghold Assault, campaign books, etc.

I would definitely support the return of Planetstrike, Stronghold Assault, Cityfight, etc. They were cool; I liked them, and I feel they could add to Crusade.

 oni wrote:

The whole Crusade thing is and continues to be a non-starter. It will never gain traction no matter how hard GW may try.

This may be your subjective experience, but it is not mine. Crusade is my favourite part of 9th edition, and it's pretty much the only way I play. If someone wants to play matched, I'd be willing to compromise- I'd probably track as much as I could for my Crusade force, but that wouldn't affect my opponent's experience.

I concede that I, and people like me are the minority on Dakka. This does not mean we do not exist.

I don't recall a supplement with those other missions,

Remember i have been playing since 3rd and the comment specifically was about 4th and 5th ed games. many of those other missions came from the 4th ed rulebook that had a host of extra game and mission types for normal games, combat patrols and kill teams.

I did not even include bunker assault, convoy, or sabotage for example that had entirely different table setups.

 oni wrote:
To course correct GW needs to stop pandering to the tournament players and get back to the fundamentals that made W40K fun and enjoyable. They can start by taking a step back towards codex simplicity with a heavy handed reduction in stratagems, detachment abilities, relics, warlord traits, etc. Next, is the elimination of book-keeping; we should be putting our time and efforts into playing and not constantly coming to a full stop to log and track win conditions.

Agree with this.

 the_scotsman wrote:
That's probably because I, the "Target" player, have only one option during my opponent's turn, i.e., to be 'The Target' and maybe pop 1-2 defensive strats or interrupts over the course of my opponent's entire turn.

Yeah, it's tough to remember That Time When The Las-Chicken Shot It's Super-Lascannons At My Guy And I Made My 6+ Armor Save, because the next las-chicken just shoots, I don't make my save vs that one, and I have accomplished "mildly inconveniencing my opponent' through no fault of my own but instead just because I rolled a 6 on a die.

For a truly memorable 'oh my god, it survived' event to occur, your thing needs to survive EVCusERYTHING your opponent has to throw at it, and in a game with super-duper-hyper-accommodating "TrUe" line of sight and a board size that makes range an essentially meaningless stat for around 2/3s of the units in the game, generally that just doesn't happen.

let's take my most recent game as an example - admech and drukhari, two top codexes using somewhat, but not entirely optimized lists. The moments of unexpected survival were as follows:

1 - turn 1, I shoot two Void Lances from my bomber at my opponent's Scorpius Disintegrator, and it survives on 2 hit points left.

....Then, I shoot a single disintegrator from a raider at it. It dies.

2 - Turn 2 - my opponent counter-charges Sicarian Ruststalkers into a unit of 15 Hellions, but I've given them a 4++ and I also drop a -1 to hit on them, so only 10 die, and the remaining 5 swing back and kill the whole ruststalker squad except for 1. The Ruststalker alpha flees, 3/5 of the remaining hellions flee, and the 2 remaining hellions are unexpectedly left on the board, don't spend it all in one place I guess!

3 - 9 antitank weapons including 2 heat lances and 4 dark lances completely fail to cause any damage to an admech flyer. This one actually did impact the outcome of the game.

4 - lelith survives the close combat attacks of a techpriest dominus, staying on one hit point. Then, on my opponent's turn, the dominus falls back and 3 skitarii vanguard easily dispatch lelith.

I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Competitive tournament setups with gigantic amounts of LOS blocking terrain might be able to turn the game into kind of a 'rocket tag cat-and-mouse' setup but if you take 2 people who have generally read thrugh the rules and set up to play a game, it is absolutely normal for each player to be losing 500-750pt chunks of their 2000pt army turn 1, turn 2 and turn 3 and someone being basically on the verge of being tabled on the bottom of turn 3 is exceedingly common.

From a gameplay perspective, I just cannot see how that isn't viewed as a massive, glaring problem, and how this could be the intended state of the game from the designers. "I got to make 0-2 decisions with any given one of my units" does not, to me, seem like something one should aim for if youre trying to design a wargame.

I'm not even really sure how even 10 Ruststalkers with blades could easily put 20 wounds on a -1 to hit 4++ unit, but I know 5 Hellions couldn't kill 9 Ruststalkers so it was a unit of 5, which seems even more impossible. Lelith can consolidate away from combat so she has the opportunity to go hide from time to time.

But, what should be the outcome for each of these scenarios? The tank got to hide behind cover before you got to shoot it? Or you got to fly behind and hit it from the read guaranteeing a kill?

AA isn't a panacea and comes with it's own problems including massively increasing the time for a game to complete as well as a really high skill ceiling. You may not be doing new players any favors with it in the long run ( e.g. Warmachine ).

PenitentJake wrote:

 oni wrote:
9th edition is definitely 'tournament-hammer'. There is no disputing this.

Yes, there is disputing this, because I dispute it. Again, whether or not YOU play Open or Crusade, both of these things do exist, and both are 9th ed. phenomenon.

I will not dispute that Matched play was designed for the tournament scene, with input from TO's. This is very clearly true.

That is not the same as "9th is the tournament edition," whether YOU think it is or not...

Personally I'm calling 9th "the tournament edition" independent of the fact that Crusade exists because there are a lot of decisions GW's made with the core rules, Codexes, and general release design that feel like the elements of the game common to Crusade and to Matched Play were written with tournament play in mind and Crusade is a tacked-on afterthought. That doesn't mean that 40k is only Matched Play and Crusade doesn't exist, or that Crusade isn't fun for you, only that I feel like I have to make concessions to tournament playstyles with regards to pretty basic things like unit choice, loadouts, and the card game to play 9e at all.

I also describe 9th as "the tournament edition" because to me the only reason to play 9th over any other wargame is "lots of people are playing it." The models are cool, yes, but I could be playing oldhammer and be able to use models I like and have fun. Crusade exists, but it's a pale shadow of the depth of campaign structure available if we pull out a skirmish system like Mordheim or Necromunda. Gameplay is half-baked, bloated, too abstract, and unnecessarily complicated, games are won far more often during list-building than on the table, and it's horrendously expensive to put together an army for and takes a lot of time and work to put on the table and play, even by comparison to other games in the same scale/army size like Legion or Bolt Action. The only reason left for me to play 9th is that it's a game people host tournaments for regularly, if I'm just playing with friends 9th might as well not exist.

 the_scotsman wrote:
I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Wondering how AA actually solves anything here. Units can still be eliminated before being activated, it just happens sequentially. Plus it creates an incentive to activate the shootiest units first by creating a penalty for taking melee specialists.

Rules that limit damage might offer a better solution. Ghaz, for example.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Wondering how AA actually solves anything here. Units can still be eliminated before being activated, it just happens sequentially. Plus it creates an incentive to activate the shootiest units first by creating a penalty for taking melee specialists.

Rules that limit damage might offer a better solution. Ghaz, for example.

If you wanted to fix 40k it might be better to try and fix the actual problem by going back and toning down the damage creep rather than throwing up your hands and saying "no, damage creep out of control, must burn down the system and start again!" (though given that that's exactly what happened in the 7th->8th transition...). As for AA it might be better to look at playing a different game that's designed for AA (say, Legion or Bolt Action) rather than trying to shoehorn AA into a system that's not really designed for it.

PenitentJake wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Indeed, it's almost like Open Play is totally pointless and exists only so GW can say there's "three ways to play" and make the game sound like it'll suit anyone.

The handful of players on Dakka who swear by Open War would probably disagree.

I'm one of those Dakka-ers that swear by Open War. Open War has honestly nothing to do with Open Play, I mentioned before that I had been to multiple tournaments that use the Open War deck to generate missions in a Matched Play tournamen setting.

Open Play is pointless, my group even uses Matched rules for Narrative Play. The general rules of the game need not to unyieldingly linked to the missions you're playing.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
That's probably because I, the "Target" player, have only one option during my opponent's turn, i.e., to be 'The Target' and maybe pop 1-2 defensive strats or interrupts over the course of my opponent's entire turn.

Yeah, it's tough to remember That Time When The Las-Chicken Shot It's Super-Lascannons At My Guy And I Made My 6+ Armor Save, because the next las-chicken just shoots, I don't make my save vs that one, and I have accomplished "mildly inconveniencing my opponent' through no fault of my own but instead just because I rolled a 6 on a die.

For a truly memorable 'oh my god, it survived' event to occur, your thing needs to survive EVCusERYTHING your opponent has to throw at it, and in a game with super-duper-hyper-accommodating "TrUe" line of sight and a board size that makes range an essentially meaningless stat for around 2/3s of the units in the game, generally that just doesn't happen.

let's take my most recent game as an example - admech and drukhari, two top codexes using somewhat, but not entirely optimized lists. The moments of unexpected survival were as follows:

1 - turn 1, I shoot two Void Lances from my bomber at my opponent's Scorpius Disintegrator, and it survives on 2 hit points left.

....Then, I shoot a single disintegrator from a raider at it. It dies.

2 - Turn 2 - my opponent counter-charges Sicarian Ruststalkers into a unit of 15 Hellions, but I've given them a 4++ and I also drop a -1 to hit on them, so only 10 die, and the remaining 5 swing back and kill the whole ruststalker squad except for 1. The Ruststalker alpha flees, 3/5 of the remaining hellions flee, and the 2 remaining hellions are unexpectedly left on the board, don't spend it all in one place I guess!

3 - 9 antitank weapons including 2 heat lances and 4 dark lances completely fail to cause any damage to an admech flyer. This one actually did impact the outcome of the game.

4 - lelith survives the close combat attacks of a techpriest dominus, staying on one hit point. Then, on my opponent's turn, the dominus falls back and 3 skitarii vanguard easily dispatch lelith.

I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Competitive tournament setups with gigantic amounts of LOS blocking terrain might be able to turn the game into kind of a 'rocket tag cat-and-mouse' setup but if you take 2 people who have generally read thrugh the rules and set up to play a game, it is absolutely normal for each player to be losing 500-750pt chunks of their 2000pt army turn 1, turn 2 and turn 3 and someone being basically on the verge of being tabled on the bottom of turn 3 is exceedingly common.

From a gameplay perspective, I just cannot see how that isn't viewed as a massive, glaring problem, and how this could be the intended state of the game from the designers. "I got to make 0-2 decisions with any given one of my units" does not, to me, seem like something one should aim for if youre trying to design a wargame.

I'm not even really sure how even 10 Ruststalkers with blades could easily put 20 wounds on a -1 to hit 4++ unit, but I know 5 Hellions couldn't kill 9 Ruststalkers so it was a unit of 5, which seems even more impossible. Lelith can consolidate away from combat so she has the opportunity to go hide from time to time.

But, what should be the outcome for each of these scenarios? The tank got to hide behind cover before you got to shoot it? Or you got to fly behind and hit it from the read guaranteeing a kill?

AA isn't a panacea and comes with it's own problems including massively increasing the time for a game to complete as well as a really high skill ceiling. You may not be doing new players any favors with it in the long run ( e.g. Warmachine ).

10 Ruststalkers, Chordclaws+Razors, Ryza subfaction trait, Assassin Constructs stratagem, Conqueror Protocol. On average rolls they should kill about 8, but they ended up killing 10. the response from the Hellions was Cursed Blade wych cult which killed a couple with mortal wounds, they had Strength+WS drugs making them hit on 2s, wound on 2s, kill on 5s to save - they rolled about average taking out 7 with their attacks - average is 7.4.

the amount of buffs, stratagems, auras, subfactions, turn-by-turn effects, purity bonuses, heck relics and WLTs because you can put THOSE on a ruststalker sergeant at potential play with current competitive units has turned the game into an absolutely un-theorizable shibboleth that generally results in things being far, far, far deadlier than you think they ever ought to be...but there it is anyway.

AA isn't a panacea but BOY does the ability to take some kind of action during your opponent's turn make a deadly game feel a whole lot less deadly. And how could you possibly create a LESS friendly for new players game situation than the current state of rules for factions like Space Marines, Drukhari and Admech? 9th edition codexes are absolute nightmares of complexity, and the second you step out of that for a second and look at any other wargame you'll find yourself asking "wait....what? That's it? That's all I need to remember? Just one single army-wide ability? one table of to-hit modifiers that applies to EVERY unit universally? One statline for a rifle, a submachine gun, an LMG, an HMG, and that's IT for infantry weapons, are you SURE I dont' need to memorize thirty-two different boltgun statlines?"

40k might have upsides compared to other wargaming systems...but its NOT accessibility to new players, holy hell.

On the AA debate, all I can say is that AA feels better to me in a high lethality game. It feels awful to spend ages painting and then setting up your dudes to have them deleted before they do anything, and that's a lot rarer in AA (it can happen, but look at how many examples in the Scotsman's example required two units).

I think the best compromise (and the best system GW ever produced except for BFG) is LOTR, which is IGOUGO but with heroic actions which allow out of sequence actions for the expenditure of a strategic resource (Might points) and leads to lots of interesting counterplay and decision making and allows you to prioritise your bad ass unit. I wish 40K would institute that kind of counterplay.

aphyon wrote:

I don't recall a supplement with those other missions,

Remember i have been playing since 3rd and the comment specifically was about 4th and 5th ed games. many of those other missions came from the 4th ed rulebook that had a host of extra game and mission types for normal games, combat patrols and kill teams.

I did not even include bunker assault, convoy, or sabotage for example that had entirely different table setups.

4th ed had 5 missions that were all end of game objectives, that wouldn't work for a second in 9th because the lethality is much too high.

I agree that the LOTR system is quite elegant. Age of Sigmar as well has some clever rules which makes "playing on the defence" a bit more fun and tactical.

The reality is that 40k's scale of battle has crept to the size of Apocalypse (in terms of unit killing power) and yet we're not using any of those essential QOL rules (damage at end of turn etc.)

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
I'm not saying 'aa solves everything' here but this is a specific problem specific to a game setup like 40k, which combines pure IGOUGO with extreme deadliness and extreme range/super permissive LOS. If you put all three of those things together, what you get is a situation where things are going to get 'stuff gets whacked off the table super easily before I felt like I got to do anything with it' as a very very common complaint, and it is ABSOLUTELY the most common complaint that I get the most often from people who have never played 40k before experiencing it for the first time.

Wondering how AA actually solves anything here. Units can still be eliminated before being activated, it just happens sequentially. Plus it creates an incentive to activate the shootiest units first by creating a penalty for taking melee specialists.

Rules that limit damage might offer a better solution. Ghaz, for example.

If you wanted to fix 40k it might be better to try and fix the actual problem by going back and toning down the damage creep rather than throwing up your hands and saying "no, damage creep out of control, must burn down the system and start again!" (though given that that's exactly what happened in the 7th->8th transition...). As for AA it might be better to look at playing a different game that's designed for AA (say, Legion or Bolt Action) rather than trying to shoehorn AA into a system that's not really designed for it.

Having played a fair bit of Bolt Action sometimes the winner winds up being determined by the random die draw to decide who gets to activate next, and that's not exactly a "feels good" moment either. Nothing like losing several activations because your opponent drew four or five dice in a row and now all your units are pinned.

I like AA in theory, but it can be implemented badly just like anything else.

Back on-topic, I always feel like "the incredible lethality of 40k" is a bit overstated. I've had plenty of turns where my opponent or I threw everything we could bring to bear on a target without killing it; if there's enough LoS blocking terrain on the board then it turns into a game of maneuver and piece-trading so my complaints tend to focus on indirect fire weapons not suffering appropriate to-hit penalties and being able to fire at units that no other friendly unit has LoS to either, to-hit penalties from different sources not stacking (I shouldn't get to ignore the penalty for firing a Heavy weapon on the move just because your jet is Supersonic), Morale just removing more models, and being able to kill model A that I can't target because I can target model B in the same unit.

LOTR is far and away GW's best rules system (at least among the ones still extant), but it only works with low model counts. It starts to seriously chug even in the higher points values normally played in that game.

I think you could adapt the basic ideas to a game like 40k, but it'd need to be reworked from the ground up to accommodate units of multiple models.